Francis sat in the ruins of the Castle of Tintagel, trying to think about King Arthur. This was holy ground, the very place in which Arthur was begotten by Uther Pendragon upon the beautiful Igraine, wife of the Duke of Cornwall. The enchanter Merlin had made that possible. But try as he would to think about the great story, all Francis could do was to look north-west over the heaving, gleaming sea from which came, so it seemed, all the light of Cornwall. This sea-light, reflected back toward the sky as if the sea itself had some source of light beneath it, had puzzled and dominated him during the whole month he had spent with the Cornishes of Chegwidden. The light gave new meaning to the legends he had brought, as appropriate luggage for a Cornish holiday. This was not the nght of the pre-Raphaelite pictures, the moony glow that bathed those impossibly noble men and perversely beautiful women; this was a world-light, a seemingly illimitable light that the sea, like a dull mirror, yielded in a form so diffused that the whole peninsula of Cornwall was pervaded by it, and although manifestly there were shadows to be seen, nevertheless the light seemed to defy shadows, and cast itself on every side of every object.
In this extraordinary, unfamiliar light—unfamiliar to Francis, who had never lived near the sea—it was surely possible to plunge oneself into the world of legend? Looking from this storied headland might one not imagine one saw the painted sails of the ship that bore Tristan and Iseult toward their meeting with King Mark? But try as he would to bully his thoughts into this legendary and poetic mode, all Francis could think of was the Cornishes of Chegwidden, and how odd they were.
Odd because they lived in this enchanted land, and appeared to be utterly impervious to enchantment. Odd because they lived where the saints of the ancient Celtic Church had proclaimed Christ’s gospel in a truly Celtic voice, long before the dark-skinned missionaries of Augustine had come from Rome with their Mediterranean Catholicism, to preach and impose belief with all the fanaticism of their kind. Apparently the Cornishes of Chegwidden had never heard of Celtic Christianity, or, if they had, could not understand that it might be something more interesting than the Low Church faith of St. Ysfael, in whose parish they lived and were the great folk. Surely the name of St. Ysfael was Celtic enough and old enough to nudge the most sluggish historical sense? The church had been there, in one form or another, since the sixth century; they knew that. But what really interested them was that in the nineteenth century a devout Cornish had contributed the thumping sum of five hundred pounds to have St. Ysfael done up in the height of Victorian Gothic style, and they were determined that not a brass ornament or an encaustic tile should be changed. There was a family story that this pious Cornish had caused a lot of old panelling—fifteenth-century or something of the sort—to be ripped out and burned, as rubbish, when the great work of restoration was done.
Odd because they seemed unaware that King Arthur might have ridden over what were now their own parklands, and that some of their oldest trees might have grown from grandacorns of trees under which the great King—the dux bellorum of the earliest records—had reined in his horse to rest and look about him in the mysterious light of the peninsula that was Cornwall. When Francis had mentioned this as a possibility, his uncle—who was named Arthur Cornish, of all things—had looked at him queerly and said that unquestionably there was a tree in the park that had been planted to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, and it was coming into promising maturity, for an oak, at this very moment, having survived two serious periods of blight.
What really interested Uncle Arthur was something called the Local Bench, upon which he sat as a magistrate as every Cornish had done for as long as there had been a Bench, and which he was now disagreeably expected to share with tradesmen and even a local socialist, who could not understand that the essence of local justice lay in knowing the local people—which ones were decent folk and which were known poachers and riff-raff—and treating them accordingly. Uncle Arthur owned a good deal of property in lands and cottages, and it was on the rents of these that Chegwidden and all its ancient glory depended. If Uncle Arthur had ever heard of Oscar Wilde as anything but a damned bad type who would have received no mercy from the Local Bench, he had certainly never heard Wilde’s comment that land gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. He would have agreed that there, at least, the bugger knew what he was talking about. The merciless exactions of modern government on landowners was his favourite topic, and if any of his kin had ever heard the word paranoia, they might have recognized that on this theme Uncle Arthur was distinctly paranoid. Modern government, he was sure, was a gigantic plot to ruin him, and in him all that was best in rural England.
His wife, Aunt May, would have described herself with appropriate modesty as a religious woman, for the doings of the parish and the services at St. Ysfael’s were her chief concern. Helping the poor, so far as the waning fortunes of the Cornishes would allow, and a repressive hand on any clergyman who showed a tendency to be High, were her great cares. What she believed, nobody knew, for she was firm in her reticence on all matters relating to the inner life. In church she was seen to pray, but to What, and what she said to It, and how It worked in her daily life, nobody knew. The chances were strong that she prayed for her son Reginald, who was with his regiment in India, and her son Hubert, who was in the Navy and hoped for a command soon, and her daughter Prudence, who had married Roderick Glasson, another oppressed neighbouring squire. Unquestionably she prayed for her tribe of grandchildren, but how efficacious such prayers were was a matter of speculation, for they were a wild lot and gave Francis a good deal of trouble.
He never, during his month at Chegwidden, got them properly sorted into families, for they came and went inexplicably, roaring in and out of the house with cricket bats and bicycles, and small guns, if they were boys. As for the girls, they were doing their uttermost, it seemed to the quiet Canadian, to get themselves killed, riding ponies in a horrible parody of polo, which they played in a meadow full of rabbit holes, so that the ponies were always stumbling, and the girls were always pitching over their heads into the path of other charging ponies. They all regarded him as a huge joke, even when he tried to impress them with his skill (learned at an expensive boys’ camp) in making a fire without matches. Because of this they called him the Last of the Mohicans, and treated his enthusiasm for King Arthur as a form of American madness. He never could be sure whose were Reginald’s, and whose Hubert’s, though he knew that two of the girls must be Prudence’s, because they assured him daily that if their older sister, Ismay Glasson, could only meet him, she would soon put him to rights. They were very proud of Ismay because she was a Terror, even among the Chegwidden lunatics. But Ismay was abroad, staying with a French family to improve her accent, and doubtless terrorizing the French.
At the family table, over bad food in restricted quantities, Francis had tried to introduce some topic that would reveal whether or not the Chegwidden Cornishes knew what a great man his father was, and how intimate he was with the Chaps Who Knew, up in London. But he discovered that Sir Francis was merely a younger brother, so far as Uncle Arthur was concerned, and that in Aunt May’s mind it was a pity that if there had to be a Lady Cornish at all, that Lady Cornish should be an American—for the Cornishes were pig-headedly determined that the pretence of Canadians not to be Americans was sheer affectation, to be rebuked whenever possible. As for the fortune that the Wooden Soldier had acquired by his marriage and his value as a trust company figurehead, it was plainly a sore touch at Chegwidden; to be a younger son, and to have money, when the elder son was struggling to keep his head above water, was intolerable cheek. So Francis was made to feel that he was not only the Last of the Mohicans, but a Rich American. He was sure the Chegwidden Cornishes did not mean it unkindly; it was simply that their excellent manners were not strong enough to keep their jealousy in complete abeyance.
From the family table Francis sometimes lifted his eyes above his plate of congealing mutton stew to look at the family por
traits that hung above the wainscot. They were, he had to admit, ghastly. They were worse, because older and more blackened and scabby, than the portraits in the Prayer Hall at school. But out of them all, though the form varied, stared the family face, a long, horsy face with gooseberry eyes in which, in some portraits, a distinction, an air of intelligence and command, showed itself. As he looked around the table, at Uncle Arthur and at the grandchildren (for of course Aunt May did not count, being a mere breeding machine in the great complex of Cornishes), that face, disappointed and severe in Uncle Arthur, and peering through puppy-fat, or schoolboy awkwardness, or under ill-braided pigtails, was repeated in a variety of styles, but always, in form and mannerism, the same. And, when he went to bed in his chilly room, he could see, in the whorled mirror, that even under the black hair he had from the McRorys, it was his own face, and that his black hair and his gooseberry eyes gave him a look which would some day be startling.
Chegwidden: a disappointment, really. After all he had suffered because of that difficult name, which was not only queer in itself but a nuisance in pronunciation, he had at least expected an impressive dwelling and, as the name suggested, a white building. But no: Chegwidden was a large, low, grubby-looking mansion of brownish-grey stone, with a lowering, unfriendly front door, pinched little windows, and a slate roof on which moss grew in patches. Old it unquestionably was; such inconvenience could not have been achieved in anything less than four centuries. Smelly it was, too, for a much-tinkered Victorian system of plumbing had never really come to terms with what was demanded of it. As it seemed to be a family habit never to throw anything away, it was cluttered with furniture and ornaments, pride of place being given to things that various Cornishes had brought home from military or naval service abroad. But the total effect was faded, down-at-heel, uncomfortable, and valetudinarian. School had habituated Francis to shabbiness and discomfort and stinks, but his notion of a family dwelling was the rich, velvety ugliness of St. Kilda, or his mother’s uncompromisingly fashionable house in Toronto. How did the Cornishes put up with a house where every chair, in the midst of summer, embraced the sitter like a cold sitz-bath, and every bed was dank from the sea mists?
Yet Father had assured him that at least half his root was here.
Try as he might, he could not evoke King Arthur, even in the ruins of Tintagel. He bicycled back through Camelford to Chegwidden, glad that tomorrow he would return to London, and after a few days take ship for Canada.
“Did you enjoy your visit to Cornwall?”
“Thank you, sir. It was very interesting.”
“But not enjoyable?”
“Oh, very enjoyable. But I thought people living there would have been more aware of the history of the place.”
“The Cornishes are the history of the place. I suppose they think of history as something that happens elsewhere. A bit provincial, was it?”
“I wouldn’t like to say that.”
“You’re a cautious fellow, aren’t you, Francis?”
“I don’t like to make hasty judgements. This is my first time in England, you see.”
“But it certainly won’t be your last, your father tells me. Going up to Oxford eventually?”
“That’s the plan.”
“By that time you might be quite a useful chap. Your father tells me you might end up in the profession.”
So that was what it was! That was why Colonel Copplestone had asked him to lunch in the Athenaeum, an impressive club in the West End, though certainly not much ahead of Chegwidden in the matter of food. Francis had been expecting something like this, Colonel Copplestone must be one of the Chaps Who Knew.
“Father spoke about it.”
“And you liked the idea?”
“I was flattered.”
“Well—no promises, of course. Just follow your nose. But we’re always on the lookout for promising young men, and if they’re promising enough, we might make a few promises later on.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Are you a letter-writer?”
“Sir?”
“Write interesting letters, do you? If you’re really interested, I want you to write letters to me.”
“What about?”
“About what you’re doing—and seeing—and thinking. I’d like a letter from you not less than once a fortnight. Write to me at this address; it’s my country place. And in the letters you address me as Uncle Jack, because I’m an old friend of your father’s, and that’s appropriate. I’m your godfather.”
“Are you, sir? I hadn’t known.”
“Neither had I, till I met you today. But that’s what I am now. So you write to me as a godfather, which is a very good relationship, because it can mean nothing very much, or quite a lot. Just one thing, though; don’t mention that your father, or your godfather, has anything whatever to do with the profession.”
“I’m not really very sure what the profession is.”
“No, of course not. For the present, it’s just the profession of men who follow their noses and see whatever’s to be seen. I don’t think we want any blancmange, do you? Let’s take our mud coffee upstairs.”
Dear Uncle Jack:
Cornwall was really great, but I liked London better. I have never seen such pictures before. Our gallery in Toronto is small, and not very good, because we have no money to buy the really first-rate pictures. Not yet. Maybe it will come. I am trying now to find out about the new pictures, by the new men, and I went to as many private galleries in London as I could, and saw a lot of stuff that puzzled me. I might as well tell you, though, that the people who ran the galleries, or perhaps I should say the young men who showed off the pictures to possible buyers, were as interesting as the pictures themselves. They are so silky, and they talk so easily about tactile values and nouveau vague, and a lot of things that were away over my head. I hadn’t really understood what an ignoramus I am.
I’ve read a bit about the new stuff. Quite a lot, really. And I understand (or think I do) that a picture shouldn’t really be about anything. Not like those awful pictures that tell a story, or show upper-class kids feeding robins in the snow, or show you Hope, or the Soul’s Awakening or something that is intended to make you feel religious, or wistful. No, a picture is just patterns of line and colour arranged on a flat surface, because it’s no good kidding yourself that it isn’t flat, is it? I mean, perspective is all very fine if it’s mathematics, but if it tries to kid you that you are looking into depth it’s a cheat. Pictures are pure form and colour. Anyway, that’s what the new books say, and certainly that is what the silky chaps in the galleries say. Nix on emotion. Perhaps even nix on meaning anything except what is in front of one’s nose.
The trouble is that in some of the best of the new stuff emotion and meaning keep breaking in. Like this chap Picasso. I saw some of his stuff at one of the galleries, and if it’s just form and colour on a flat surface, I’m dreaming. It’s a statement of some sort. Not that I could tell you what the statement is, but I’m sure it’s there, and I’m sure that if I can stick with it long enough, I’ll find the meaning.
And Old Masters! Of course I’ve done my best with the new painting, but I admit I liked the Old Masters best. I think I know why. As you know, I was raised a Catholic—or perhaps not exactly raised one but a lot of Catholicism was bootlegged into my early days by a great-aunt, and unless I can drain every drop of it out of me—and I don’t seem to have much luck doing that—those Nativities and Adorations and Crucifixions and Transfigurations can never be simply clever arrangements of line, volume, and colour for me. They are statements, some strong, some not so strong, some fancy, some terribly plain. Were the old boys wrong? I try to think so, but it won’t work.
You are partly to blame, godfather. You say follow your nose, and if I do it takes me in some very unmodern and unfashionable directions. If I’m to see pictures the modern way, and no other way, I guess I’ll have to cut off my nose. And that would spite my face, wouldn’t it?
I don’t intend to spite my face, ever, or turn my back on old friends. Do you know of a caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss? I owe a lot to him, or I should say to a book of his that was my Bible for a while. The other day, in a shop that sells drawings and pictures, I found an original sketch of an actor called Lewis Waller (never heard of him) by H.F. and I bought it, just for old sake’s sake, for ten pounds. Which is pretty steep for my pocket. But I couldn’t resist it. Just to have something H.F. had touched. How the silky boys would despise it, but it’s a wonder of artistic economy.
I have sore feet from trudging through the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace, the Victoria and Albert. All full of marvels. And what do you think? I have a favourite picture! I know I shouldn’t, and crushes on works of art are the worst kind of amateurism, but it absolutely stuns me. In the Nat. Gal. a big picture called An Allegory of Time by Bronzino; 1502-72 it says and otherwise I know nothing about him. But what a statement! And what is the statement and what is the allegory? I stare and stare and can’t figure it out.
Do you know it? What hits you first is the nude figure of a beautiful woman, superbly fleshly and naked as a jay-bird except for a coronet of jewels. I mean she isn’t just nude, which can be like a corpse on the embalmer’s table, but astonishingly naked. A youth who looks about fourteen stoops toward her from the left, kissing her, and it’s plain that her tongue is pushing between his lips—French kissing they call that, godfather—and if they are really mother and son it’s a pretty queer situation; furthermore his right hand is on her left breast, the nipple peeping between his index and second fingers, which it wouldn’t do unless the kiss meant more than just good-morning or something like that. His left hand is drawing her head toward him. On the right a stout baby, with a knowing smile, is winding up to throw some roses over them. So far, so good. But a vigorous, muscular old man, looking as though he wasn’t very pleased by the goings-on, is either drawing a blue curtain over this scene, or else he is revealing it. Can’t be sure. A woman is helping him, only her head visible, but beneath her and just behind Cupid’s out-thrust rump is another woman whose face is torn with pain—is it? or could it be jealousy? Behind the fat baby is a creature with a childlike but not an innocent face, and the body attaching to it ends in a serpent’s tail and the terrible feet of a lion. Two masks, one young and one old, lie on the ground.
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